An international arbitration panel in the Netherlands on Monday ordered Moscow to pay $51.57 billion in damages to shareholders in the defunct oil giant Yukos, saying officials under President Vladimir Putin had manipulated the legal system to bankrupt the company.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague issued rulings in three separate cases that had sought a total of over $100 billion from Russia for expropriating the assets of Yukos, formerly controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man.

The decision, which followed nearly a decade of hearings, comes at a time of strained relations between Moscow and the Netherlands over the downing of a Malaysian airliner carrying 298 passengers and crew, including 194 Dutch citizens.

"It is fantastic that the company shareholders are being given a chance to recover their damages," Khodorkovsky said in a statement, adding he would not seek to benefit financially from the outcome.

The claim in the Hague was made by subsidiaries of Gibraltar-based Group Menatep, a company through which Mr Khodorkovsky once controlled Yukos. Group Menatep now exists as holding company GML, while Mr Khodorkovsky is no longer a shareholder in GML or Yukos.

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"Russian courts bent to the will of Russian executive authorities to bankrupt Yukos, assign its assets to a state-controlled company, and incarcerate a man who gave signs of becoming a political competitor," the court said.

Yukos was sold off in opaque auctions to state companies led by Rosneft. The government firm was then a small player but today stands as the world's biggest stock market publicly traded producer of oil.

A panel of judges, which has been reviewing the case since 2005, said "these have been mammoth arbitrations" with total claims having reached $114 billion.

The panel concluded that "the primary objective of the Russian Federation was not to collect taxes but rather to bankrupt Yukos and appropriate its valuable assets".

Moscow was ordered to pay damages to compensate claimants, but the tribunal said there was also some fault on behalf of claimants, which had led to a reduction in the size of the award.

It said that "officials of the Russian Federation in close association with President Putin acted in implementation of the policy of the Russian Federation".

Russia was said to have infringed an international energy charter, adopted in 1991, that envisaged legal issues for investments in energy sectors.

His company, once worth $40bn, was broken up and nationalised, with most assets handed to Rosneft, a company run by Igor Sechin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

In a case which Kremlin critics said offered a stark example of Mr Putin's increasingly autocratic rule, Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest was justified by the Russian leader who claimed: "A thief must be in jail."

The funds won will be shared amongst the Yukos shareholders. The biggest ultimate beneficial owner is expected to Russian-born Leonid Nevzlin, a business partner who had fled to Israel to avoid prosecution, who has a stake of around 70pc.

The other four ultimate beneficial owners, each of whom owns an equal stake, are Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Brudno, Vladimir Dubov and Vasilly Shaknovski.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, said Russia would use every means to defend itself, while Rosneft said all its dealings were lawful.

Separately, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg is expected to announce within days another decision on the Yukos claim against Russia, ruling on 'just satisfaction' or compensation, a Yukos spokeswoman said on Monday.

Yukos' application in the ECHR, which is on behalf of all Yukos shareholders, is separate from the claim made by the GML group of shareholders in the Hague.

The case in the ECHR argued that Yukos was unlawfully deprived of its possessions by the imposition of bogus taxes and a sham auction of its main asset. An interim ruling by the ECHR in 2011 found partly in favour of the Russian Federation but invited a claim for 'just satisfaction' from Yukos.